1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a surgery simulation system, more particularly to a three-dimensional surgery simulation system that facilitates simulation of various surgical procedures in a three-dimensional environment with relatively high accuracy and at a relatively low cost.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the on-going global advances in surgical knowledge and practice, medical school students, interns, or even senior surgeons need to continuously enrich their professional knowledge of surgical techniques and procedures so as to provide patients with the best and most up-to-date medical services.
In the field of orthopedics or plastic surgery, for instance, if surgery simulating equipment is not available to assist teaching and training of surgeons, it is not possible to predict the outcome of an operation with a certain degree of accuracy or to meet the expectations of the patient undergoing the operation. Accordingly, the outcome of the operation depends largely on the clinical experience of the surgeon. Moreover, an operation subjects the patient to high risks because the patient's body does not lend itself to a trial-and-error process. If the operation is not successful, a remedial operation may be needed, which is, again, without certainty of success.
Therefore, teaching hospitals and some medical institutions in general have included surgery simulations as part of their curriculums or training programs. Traditionally, surgery simulations are largely limited to two-dimensional paper simulations based on X-ray images. In recent years, various two-dimensional surgery visual simulating equipment have been proposed to permit input of a desired manipulation and to display a two-dimensional image of the simulation result on a display. However, due to topological changes in skeletal morphology, a two-dimensional model is not sufficient to depict the geometry of bone structures in a realistic manner. Therefore, there are considerable visual errors when viewing the two-dimensional model on the display. In addition, since the manipulation is limited by the two-dimensional image, and since the input information cannot adequately match the manipulation in an actual operation, the simulation result is expectedly low and unreliable. Such a simulation model is therefore not very helpful to students or trainees as a pre-operation simulation tool, and the simulation result is not reliable when predicting the outcome of an operation.